Posts Tagged ‘chicken enchiladas’

Home made enchiladas! Doesn’t the sound of that just bring a smile to your face and some hunger to your belly? Everyone makes a different enchilada sauces, from the moles to the white sauces to the traditional red sauces…and by no means is each recipe one to write home to mom about, but the thought of coming home to this home made meal encourages one to press the gas pedal just a little bit harder.

The Latino population is growing in the United States and I for one am excited about all the possibilities that entails. Latino foods, such as the home made enchiladas, are truly magnificent and bring to the table an entirely different culture and unique taste. Of course, when you travel in Latin America there are abundant Coke products and countless Nestle advertisements, but let’s put that aspect of globalization to the side.

Food can often be a bridge across cultural divides and I see no reason why home made enchiladas can’t help us to understand the Latin culture a little bit better. Corn has always been a staple in Mexico (of course there are some serious problems with the corn market right now and the price of corn tortillas has been steadily rising and may in fact sky rocket quite soon) and so of course corn tortillas will play a role.

Home made enchiladas are first and fore most about a great enchilada sauce. The tortillas are dredged in the sauce then stuffed with chicken and cheese and peppers or whatever else you happen to fancy at the time and then baked with more sauce poured in on top. Once the actual sauce has been made, home made enchiladas are really quite easy and quick to make for dinner.

I filmed my dad making his home made enchiladas for duckspoon.com. It is part of our economy program because we take about half the dark meat from the chicken we roasted off and make the enchilada dinner with it. So come check out our version of home made enchiladas on duckspoon.com and you can find out for yourself how tasty and how inexpensive they are.

How to make enchiladas is, in my mind, a fundamental lesson for our children to learn how to respect other cultures, and Latino cultures in particular. Food can help us understand people and learning a people’s cuisine can shed insights on how they think and why they perform certain actions. Understanding food by the actual cooking of it far surpasses what we can learn by going to eat in a restaurant that serves that food.

The use of corn tortillas, for example, in learning how to make enchiladas shows us that the Mexican culture has an abundance of corn and they can feed the populace cheaply using corn tortillas. Chickens can be raised in the back yard and tomatoes and chilies can be grown in abundance in the garden as well. All these geographic nuances can be deciphered by breaking down the varied components of the dish.

First we learn the ingredients, and then we can learn the entire process of how to make enchiladas. The corn must be milled and then fried into tortillas; the tomatoes must be roasted and made into a sauce; the chiles need to be dried, pounded into powder, and mixed with herbs. Of course most people in Mexico buy the tortillas from someone who uses those efforts to earn a living, but the knowledge of making corn tortillas is easily learned, and once learned, understood. Although the final dinner can be put together quickly, the preparation takes time and has a history of its own.

“How to make enchiladas” isn’t merely a procedural task. The creation of this truly hispanic meal is ingrained with the culture, history, and character of the people that it sprang from. Whereas a taco can be thrown together somewhat quickly (if the tortillas are made, the chickens slaughtered, etc…), how to make enchiladas really revolves around the slow formation of the enchilada sauce. The enchilada sauce itself is a tradition that varies throughout the many regions of Mexico.

I am very happy that when my niece, Ronnie, asks me how to make enchiladas I can reply not only by taking her to a computer and showing her a video detailing the steps out, but I can also fill her in on some of the historic, cultural and geographic facts that helped shape the food we eat. I sincerely hope that by teaching my niece how to make enchiladas I will be opening her eyes to the vast information that can be learned from world cuisine.